People need a degree of free choice for creativity and change to happen. But they must also have boundaries. At one level this is what politics and business are all about. Too much of the wrong sort of control and the system becomes bureaucratic or tyrannical, too little and it becomes arbitrary and chaotic.

What we are looking for in business or in politics, is a process for directing the creativity of complex systems with a right balance between control and freedom; between clarity and mist; between fecundity and death.

Managing these paradoxical forces is what artists do. Artists know that in making a vision manifest in the real world, it will change and adapt. Paintings, books and plays are made – they are not designed and implemented. Along the way there is room for continual adaptation and openness to the continuous possibility of a better manifestation of the vision.

Published by Palgrave McMillan. ISBN 9780230201996 £25.00

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